Freelance Writer/Editor

Book Reviews

04 May 2019

Since college, I've been a devoted Ani Difranco fan. If a CD were as delicate as a record, I would've worn away the grooves on Out of Range (1994) long ago. Some of her lyrics—so wise, so feminist, and so sexy—floor me to this day. I even introduced my great aunt Holly to her music. In the late '90s my sister and I took her to see Ani perform at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. I'm not sure what she thought, exactly, when she heard this small, fierce woman sing the lyrics to "Untouchable Face," but she looked momentarily shocked and then, a little giddy. (Holly was a song-writer and playwright, so I like to think a tiny part of her appreciated Ani, even though her use of the F-bomb to address a lover might have shocked Holly's refined sensibility.)

26 January 2015

A series of books over the past decade has extolled the environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture and how delicious it can taste. Michael Pollan's groundbreaking “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” popularized grass-fed beef and eggs from pastured chickens. Dan Barber’s “The Third Plate” celebrates free-range foie gras and heirloom wheat. But no writer has devoted a whole book to the lowly lentil. Until now.

In “Lentil Underground,” Liz Carlisle (a Pollan protégé and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Diversified Farming Systems) elevates the oft-ignored legume to heroic game-changer. In the late 1980s, a scrappy group of four Montana farmers discover that “this Robin Hood of the dryland prairie” robs fertility from aboveground, sharing it freely in the soil. Lentils are what agroecologist Miguel Altieri call a “green manure” — they fix nitrogen in the soil, obviating the need for chemical fertilizers. The farmers, already disenchanted with the fossil-fuel-based grain monoculture of the Great Plains — which not only depletes the soil of nitrogen but also offers razor-slim profit margins — form a company called Timeless Seeds.

Today, it’s not unusual to find farmers who spurn herbicides and chemical fertilizers and employ a diverse rotation of crops. But back in 1987, when David Oien and three others launched Timeless, wheat was king in Montana. “Amber waves of grain were like a religion in this part of the west,” Carlisle writes. “Any other plant life was labeled a weed and taken as a sign of some deep character flaw.” Puzzled by their unkempt fields of black medic (another potent nitrogen-fixer that some might call a weed), wheat farmers ridiculed their lentil-growing neighbors, calling them “a bunch of damn weed farmers!”

Carlisle embeds herself with these pioneering organic growers — sometimes even waking up for breakfast at their farms — and chronicles their setbacks and successes. It’s a typical story of being ahead of the curve. In the late ’80s, Oien and his fellow lentil farmers struggled to make a profit. But by the mid-’90s, lentils — especially the French green lentils and Black Belugas that Timeless grows — were increasingly in demand at natural food stores and high-end restaurants. Timeless got lucrative contracts with Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, both of which amped up production and profits, and chefs at high-end restaurants promised to put Black Belugas on every plate.

Along the way, Carlisle introduces us to memorable characters who subvert the stereotype of the laconic, corn-fed middle American farmer. Oien, a long-haired idealist who studied religion in college, signs official documents with a peace sign. Casey Bailey, 32, practices yoga, sings arias as he runs a tractor, and is “the sole Timeless farmer who had been to both a major Occupy protest and countercultural mecca Esalen.” Then there are Tuna McAlpine, a pro-gun libertarian who becomes an outspoken advocate for organic farming, and Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree a veteran organic inspector and a sustainable operations director for a federal agency, respectively. (They farm on the weekends.)

Carlisle is a clear and vivid writer. The founders of Timeless Seeds are “audacity rich, but capital poor.” She describes one lentil farmer’s “bearish” arms as “more like verbs than nouns.” And her pithy explanations of nitrogen-fixing plants, no-till agriculture, and why industrial agriculture is ruinous for both farmers and the environment are good primers for anyone just starting to learn about sustainable agriculture. However, sometimes her chronological history of the lentil underground feels rote. And more than once she takes readers into the weeds (pun intended), with lengthy backgrounds on two Montana nonprofits.

But overall, hers is an important contribution to the sustainable agricultural genre. Carlisle unearths some unusual agroecological practices that should gain a foothold in mainstream farming, such as “undersowing” — the idea of planting a “green manure” crop (such as medic) and a grain crop simultaneously, so as to boost fertility and increase yield of the primary cash crop without waiting a full year in between. She also tells the fascinating lineage of the black Indianhead lentil, which almost sank into obscurity until an heirloom bean buyer named Lola rechristened it Black Beluga because of their “inky resemblance to high-end caviar.”

Most importantly, Carlisle offers a vision of an alternative future. At a time when fertilizer run-off from industrial farms and feedlots alike is creating “dead zones” bigger than the state of Connecticut, and herbicide-resistant superweeds are proliferating at an alarming rate, America needs a resilient farming system like the one created by Montana’s lentil underground.

Will lentils change the world? They aren’t magic beans, Carlisle cautions. But they’re lower on the food chain — not to mention more affordable — than grass-fed beef or free-range foie gras. When I finished “Lentil Underground,” the first thing I did was go onto Timeless Seed’s website to locate a store near my home in Portland where I can buy their Black Belugas. I’m already planning my first meal: coconut-oil simmered kale with red peppers, Black Belugas and roasted squash.

15 September 2014

“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” 19th century foodie-philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously said. In “The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity,” Berkeley poet and feminist literary critic Sandra Gilbert takes this oft-repeated injunction one step further, saying that what we read and write about what we eat is just as vital to self-knowledge.

Gilbert, who is best known for her feminist lit-crit tour de force “The Madwoman in the Attic,” co-authored with Susan Gubar, is interested in our current obsession with food. From food blogs and “gastroporn” magazines to “recipe novels,” foodoirs (food memoirs), food polemics and, of course, TV cooking shows, we are experiencing a “gastronomical feeding frenzy that’s both unprecedented and deeply significant,” Gilbert writes. Tracing this preoccupation in literature, art, film and even pop culture is the broad task Gilbert sets for herself in this sometimes dizzying cultural history.

Gilbert’s literary, artistic and cultural references span the centuries as well as the globe. She is as comfortable discussing Plato and Rabelais as she is interpreting the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti’s cookbook or Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” And though she’s well versed in the literary canon, Gilbert is hardly a highbrow academic snob, including passages on Lady Gaga, cult mystery writer Rex Stout and popular movies like “Ratatouille” and “Like Water for Chocolate.”

Lest you settle down to read this book while enjoying a snack, be forewarned: Not everything Gilbert examines is appetizing. Though she re-creates famous literary feasts (Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” Joyce’s “The Dead”) and odes to sensual fruits (William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence), Gilbert also covers the unpleasant parts of eating. A chapter called “Black Cake,” after an Emily Dickinson recipe for spice cake, is devoted to the subject of food and death. Weaving in her personal memories of love and loss, Gilbert shares grim tidbits, such as websites that chronicle the final meals of death row inmates and the detailed food fantasies of the starving women at Terezin concentration camp. (They left behind a cookbook of recipes, recollected from memory, including one for deviled eggs garnished with smoked salmon and caviar.) Later in the book, Gilbert examines — in some detail — cannibalism throughout the ages, nausea (Sartre, Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” etc.), scatological perversions and even eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia.

Gilbert’s romp through the literary and film canon can be fascinating, but it suffers from a lack of focus. In a chapter on “the Kitchen Muse,” ostensibly about the pleasures of the cook and the joys of transcendental gastronomy, she digresses to fill us in on D.H. Lawrence’s love-hate relationship with Whitman and T.S. Eliot’s anti-Lawrence lectures. It is hard to see why this is relevant to the way modernist writers depicted fruit in poetry. One chapter starts as a discarded memoir about the herbs her relatives cooked with, then morphs into a survey of recent ethnic food memoirs with a lengthy digression on a vacation in Turkey where Gilbert annoyed an Italian couple by showing familiarity with their cuisine.

And often, Gilbert will pose an intriguing question at the start of a chapter — such as “why and how did the kitchen invade the living room and the theater?” — only to interrupt her own line of inquiry with a tangential stray thought. In this case, she divulges that she and her friends “sometimes wait weeks or months” for reservations at the French Laundry, Per Se and Momofuku. This proves her street cred (“I, too, am a serious foodie”), but it doesn’t get to the heart of why we’re obsessed with watching celebrity chefs on TV.

Finally, it must be said: This is a scholarly work and at times it gets bogged down with footnotes and fanciful interpretations. I’d wager Gilbert is the only (re)viewer of “Ratatouille” who thinks the scene where the rats take over Gusteau’s kitchen “underlines what Jacques Derrida would call the renversement.” And who but a feminist critic would use psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory of the ever-giving “good breast” to deconstruct the Raggedy Ann tales?

Not every reader will agree with Gilbert’s interpretations of touchstone culinary scenes from literature, film and food memoirs, but the great service she offers is to remind us that these texts exist. I’d long since forgotten the scene in “Little Women” where Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy surrender their Christmas breakfasts to their poor immigrant neighbors. (“There were not in all the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.”)

And Gilbert’s lengthy section on Julia Child — “gangly, breathless, always with (in her husband’s words) 'a slight atmosphere of hysteria’ edging her inimitably swooping voice” — nudged me to move “The French Chef” with Julia Child to the top of my Netflix list. After Gilbert quotes from M.F.K. Fisher’s essay “The Lemmings at Sea” — a confident celebration of dining alone — I pulled my copy of “The Gastronomical Me” off the shelf. I intend to reread it soon.

28 March 2013

In “Salt Sugar Fat," investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how
executives and food scientists at Coca-Cola, Kraft, Frito-Lay and Nestle
are well aware that sugary, fatty and salty foods light up the same
pleasure centers in our brains that cocaine does. Though they avoid
using the word “addictive,” they knowingly concoct “crave-able” foods
that have a high “bliss point” of sugar and hefty “mouthfeels” of fat.
At the same time, they employ insidious tactics to keep their “heavy
users” using and to hook new consumers, especially children. If you had
any doubt as to the food industry’s complicity in our obesity epidemic,
it will evaporate when you read this astonishing book.

Moss shows us how ruthless these companies are
at exploiting our built-in cravings for salt, sugar and fat,
aggressively marketing junk food not just to children but to the poor.
The class division becomes even more apparent when Moss asks food
scientists and executives at these companies if they drink soda or feed
their kids Cheetos and Lunchables (prepackaged trays of bologna,
“cheese” and crackers). They don’t. When Moss sits down with Howard
Moskowitz, the man who reinvented Dr Pepper, to taste his signature
drink, Moskowitz demurs: “I’m not a soda drinker. It’s not good for your
teeth.”

"Salt, Sugar, Fat" is an indictment of both big food and government, which has proved ineffective at protecting the public's health.

08 June 2012

Inextricably bound up with M.F.K. Fisher’s lifelong passion for food was
the pleasure she took from sipping and serving a simple house wine, a
crisp aperitif or a prickly, delicious glass of Champagne. In “M.F.K.
Fisher: Musings on Wine and other Libations” (Sterling Epicure; $19),
Fisher’s biographer, Anne Zimmerman, gathers all of the eminent food
writer’s essays on drink under one beautifully designed cover. Some of
these gems have been plucked from well-known collections, like “The Art
of Eating” and “Long Ago in France,” but many others — the entertaining
“a Vintage Spat,” for example, and the rousing “Wine is Life” — have
been out of print for decades. For Fisher fans, coming across these is
like reading an as-yet-unopened letter from a dear old friend.

07 June 2012

Economist Tyler Cowen calls himself an “everyday foodie,” and his new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch,” is aimed at people like him. So it seems reasonable to ask: What is an everyday foodie? A single mom on food stamps who shops at the farmers market? A locavore who cooks nourishing meals for less than $5?

It’s impossible to say, because throughout this distractingly discursive book, Cowen never defines the term. At first, he hints that he’s addressing eaters of a lower income bracket. “I also view wise eating as a way to limit inequality,” he writes, noting that in the United States the wealthy often eat better than the middle class. “It doesn’t have to be this way and I’m explaining how, even on a modest income, you can eat and enjoy some of the tastiest food in the world.”

Cowen goes on to mischaracterize locavores and Slow Food activists as "food snobs," and argues unpersuasively that we'll need genetically modified crops to solve world hunger. To read more, see my book review in the Washington Post, which ran on June 1st.

06 March 2012

Tracie McMillan grew up on Tuna Helper and Ortega Taco Dinners and was raised to believe that farm-fresh, home-cooked food was for “fancy” people. But a decade ago, while covering the poverty beat for a small New York City magazine, she jettisoned these class assumptions about food. Writing about a program that teaches low-income youth to cook healthy food, she met 18-year-old Vanessa, who loved vegetables and wished she had a farmers’ market in her neighborhood but was resigned to eating what’s cheap and accessible: Burger King Whoppers and processed food from the supermarket.

“If you want people to eat healthy, why make it so expensive?” Vanessa wonders.

This question—which haunted McMillan as she watched New Yorkers rhapsodize over $6-a-pound farmers’ market tomatoes—is what drove her to undertake a year-long investigation of the American “foodscape,” from (industrial) farm to (chain restaurant) plate.

Continue reading my review of McMillan's book, the American Way of Eating, which ran in Sunday's Oregonian.

20 January 2012

After Novella Carpenter’s critically acclaimed memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer came out, she and friend Willow Rosenthal, the founder of West Oakland gardening nonprofit City Slicker Farms, started talking about compiling a manual on urban gardening. “We always got these random emails like, ‘My chickens aren’t laying anymore!’” says Carpenter. So she and Rosenthal joked that they should write a book so they could reply: “Buy the book!”

Three years later, they can. Their new book, The Essential Urban Farmer, is a 500-page nuts-and-bolts guide to farming in the city — complete with sample garden designs, detailed illustrations, and photos of rabbit genitalia. Rosenthal, who is also a Waldorf School teacher and runs a small CSA in Berkeley, wrote the first two sections of the book: “Designing Your Urban Farm” and “Raising City Vegetables and Fruits.” Carpenter wrote the section called “Raising City Animals.” With advice on how to fix a chicken’s prolapsed “vent,” and a detailed how-to on eviscerating a chicken, it’s not for the squeamish. But then, neither is raising livestock.

I recently talked to Carpenter and Rosenthal about the guide, and got some tips about how to create a thriving urban farm. Read the full interview on Grist.

31 March 2008

Reading Benjamin Skinner's book
A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery
was a sober experience, yet I couldn't put it down. It's a well-written, thoroughly reported investigation into modern-day slavery (or as the Bush Administration euphemistically calls it, "Human Trafficking") with first-hand accounts of the slaves Skinner got to know on his four years of travel across the globe—from Haiti to India and Moldova to, yes, Miami.

The book gave me nightmares but it also inspired me to call attention to this subject—I plan to write my senators (one of whom is still running for president) as well as make donations to Free the Slaves, the abolitionist group run by Dr. Kevin Bales, a slavery scholar and author of "Disposable People." As Samantha Power, who blurbed the book, says: "A Crime so Monstrous is
the rare book that doesn't simply expose these harms; it also explains
how and why decent people inside and outside the U.S. government have
averted their gaze, and it showcases those who have devoted their lives
to curtailing a shockingly prevalent crime against humanity. Skinner
has written an anguishing book, but also an inspiring call to action."

Oddly, reading Skinner's book and talking to him for this Q&A in Salon coincided with my watching the second season of "The Wire," which revolves around the unsolved mystery of a shipping container of Eastern European "Jane Does" who Jimmy McNulty thinks were intentionally suffocated before being inducted into a (no doubt slave) brothel in Baltimore. Slavery, which before I read "A Crime so Monstrous" was invisible to me now seems to be lurking around every corner.

Start by buying Skinner's book--you'll be just as appalled and enraged as I was.

29 November 2007

O.K., I'm being saucy. But, it's truly amazing that the same man who wrote The Double Helix (and co-discovered the structure of DNA) wrote this contrived, dull memoir. Here's what I had to say about Avoid Boring People in my review for the San Francisco Chronicle.

20 August 2007

A few months ago, I went to a New York Public Library panel where the writer Jan Morris spoke about her life and travels. During the Q&A session, a fan asked if she read current travel writing. Her response was no, but then, after considering for a moment, she mentioned that she was lately glued to the galleys of a travelogue about a woman who rowed down the Nile by herself, getting in hair-raising situations along the way. Intrigued, I went home and googled "Nile + woman + alone" and finally came across the Amazon pre-publication entry for Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff, my introduction to Rosemary Mahoney. Now I'm hooked. Here's my review, which I wrote for JANERA.com.

20 August 2006

MORGAN ROAD; 279 PAGES; $24.95
In the recent movie "Click," Michael Newman (played by Adam Sandler) is stumped when his wife asks him to name the song that was playing during their first kiss. Unlike most men, Michael is able to retrieve this fact (as well as the color of her sweater) thanks to a universal remote control. He pauses, rewinds to that night, and then fast-forwards to the present, where he tells his wife the song name and then, just to prove he's not a forgetful cad, says, "And you looked beautiful in that pink sweater." Crisis averted.

A silly scene, perhaps, and one that many women in the audience probably dismissed as a hackneyed stereotype. After all, aren't there some men out there who have a memory for details from first dates, weddings and other relationship highs and lows? Not according to neuropsychologist Louann Brizendine.

In her new book, "The Female Brain," Brizendine says that women are better than men at remembering the details of emotional events because their brains are structurally and chemically different. This is not essentialist malarkey; scientists have studied living, thinking female (and male) brains with PET and MRI scans. Simply put, the hippocampus -- site of emotions and memory formation -- is larger in women, as are the brain areas for language. Men, on the other hand, have larger brain centers for action and aggression. (They also have 2 1/2 times the brain space devoted to the sexual drive, according to Brizendine.) Much of these variances start in utero, during the eighth week of pregnancy, when the then-female brain will either receive a testosterone surge or not. The screenwriters of "Click," then, weren't so far off the mark.

Those of us who grew up or came of age during the feminist revolution may find these "hardwired" biological differences hard to swallow. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, most feminists privilege nurture -- you should be able to raise a son to be gentle and emotionally nuanced, just as you can raise a daughter to be a physically active, aggressive tomboy. Brizendine, who founded the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic at UCSF in 1994, was an undergrad at Berkeley during the late '70s. She knows she's tackled a controversial subject, and she addresses skeptics in the introduction: "If in the name of free will -- and political correctness -- we try to deny the influence of biology on the brain, we begin fighting our own nature," she says. "The brain is nothing if not a talented learning machine. Nothing is completely fixed. Biology powerfully affects but does not lock in our reality." In other words, even though this book makes the argument that women's behavior -- and men's -- is to some extent biologically determined, it is possible to override these behaviors.

Brizendine has compiled nearly 60 pages of references and dozens of endnotes (though they are hard to navigate because they don't have corresponding numbers in the text) to support her thesis. However, some assertions call out for a more thorough explanation, within the text. In her chapter on "Love and Trust," Brizendine claims that men fall in love "at first sight" more easily than women do. They do? How do we know this? Flipping to the endnotes, the curious reader will find the name of one study and one book, Helen Fisher's "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." What's missing is a brief explanation of the study (How many subjects where there? How long were these male lovebirds observed?) or a short summary of Fisher's relevant argument.

In her chapter on sex, Brizendine says that women are attracted to "symmetrical" men because they give women better and more frequent orgasms. Here, though she does summarize her source (it was a study of 86 sexually active 22-year-old couples), she offers no theory as to why this might be true. (Do women feel more at ease with symmetrical-looking men? Or are symmetrical-looking men, for some reason, better lovers?) And in an apparent contradiction to what she claims in an earlier chapter -- that women are wired to mate with men who will be faithful and steady -- she tells us that studies have shown that handsome (i.e., symmetrical) men cheat on their mates more often than do men with "less well-balanced bodies."

Ladies: Our choices are slim. We can either have a great sex life and expect our cute partner to be a cheat, or we can choose a "less well-balanced" man, who, though faithful, will not know what to do with a clitoris. As Brizendine herself puts it: "There are the ones for hot sex and the ones for safety, comfort, and child rearing. Women are constantly longing for both wrapped into one package, but sadly, science shows that this may be wishful thinking."

Brizendine sounds surprisingly naive elsewhere in the book as well. After speculating that, like prairie voles, some men may have a gene sequence for monogamy, Brizendine delivers this scoop: "We now know women cheat, too." One wonders how many studies Brizendine had to sift through before coming to this conclusion. And while it's fascinating to learn why women's brains get in their way of having round-the-clock sex, do we really need a neuropsychiatrist to tell us that a woman won't have sex with her partner while she's angry at him?

Though her chapters on the teen girl brain and the "mature" female brain are both riveting, Brizendine is at her best when describing the neurochemical underpinnings of passionate love. If you've ever wondered why your critical faculties shut down when you're falling in love, you'll want to read her clear description of how the amygdala (the brain's fear-alert system) and the anterior cingulate cortex (the brain's system for worrying and critical thinking) tune out when you're high on dopamine, estrogen and oxytocin. And while incurable romantics may not want to demystify the intense six- to eight-month period that kicks off most amorous relationships, they may find it helpful to know why it must ultimately come to an end.

For a scientist, Brizendine relies heavily on anecdotes. Even though she says that child development is "inextricably both" nature and nurture, she starts Chapter 1 with a vivid story of a patient who gave her 3-year-old daughter a toy fire truck instead of a doll. One afternoon, the patient walks into her child's room to find her rocking the truck and saying, "Don't worry, little truckie, everything will be all right." Though this is hardly proof that the girl's brain was hardwired for nurturing -- we don't know what other environmental influences (television, friends, babysitters, other female figures) may have shaped her -- it serves to support Brizendine's point that "there is no unisex brain."

For each anecdote she tells that reinforces a gender stereotype (a man forgets the details of his wedding day, while his wife remembers every minute of it; a sobbing woman seeks solace from her husband, but all he can do is give her a pat on the back and say, "Okay, that's enough"; a woman bites her tongue to avoid expressing anger to her husband) this reader can think of at least one exception.

And this is the biggest flaw of "The Female Brain": Brizendine does not allow for (or explain) these exceptions. Has my boyfriend, who can remember more nuances than I can about our first few dates, triumphed over "ancient wiring" by learning this "feminine" skill? Does my father, who is at ease comforting a crying woman, lack testosterone? And what of all the women I know who have short tempers? Do their brains have aberrantly large amygdalae? And on and on.

Instead of allowing for such exceptions, Brizendine pretends they're not there. In the end, this undermines her argument. Yes, men and women's brains are different; but within each gender, you'll find a wide range of behaviors -- and to ignore this fact is to present a narrow view of human experience.